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In that realm it has also vision, through the
Intellectual-Principle, of The Good which does not so hold to
itself as not to reach the soul; what intervenes between them is
not body and therefore is no hindrance- and, indeed, where bodily
forms do intervene there is still access in many ways from the
primal to the tertiaries.
If, on the contrary, the soul gives itself to the inferior, the
same principle of penetration comes into play, and it possesses
itself, by memory and imagination, of the thing it desired: and
hence the memory, even dealing with the highest, is not the
highest. Memory, of course, must be understood not merely of what
might be called the sense of remembrance, but so as to include a
condition induced by the past experience or vision. There is such
a thing as possessing more powerfully without consciousness than
in full knowledge; with full awareness the possession is of
something quite distinct from the self; unconscious possession
runs very close to identity, and any such approach to
identification with the lower means the deeper fall of the soul.
If the soul, on abandoning its place in the Supreme, revives its
memories of the lower, it must have in some form possessed them
even there though the activity of the beings in that realm kept
them in abeyance: they could not be in the nature of impressions
permanently adopted- a notion which would entail absurdities- but
were no more than a potentiality realized after return. When that
energy of the Intellectual world ceases to tell upon the soul, it
sees what it saw in the earlier state before it revisited the
Supreme.
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